3.12.2007

Nasty and personal

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming. ...

"I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal."

Eeeensteresting, especially since immediately after he expresses this sentiment at the end of the Great Global Warming Swindle [google video link], all non-skeptics are characterized as being hijacked by a sinister conspiracy of grant-greedy scientists and extremist environmentalists who force Africans to live without an electrical grid, sell their natural resources to multinational companies, and cope with flimsy solar panels that can't even power a compact fluorescent lightbulb. And then we have this from Patrick Moore "co-founder, Greenpeace" who usuallly gets rolled out for things like this these days [my transcript, my emphasis]:

The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries. I think it's legitimate for me to call them anti-human. Like, OK, you don't have to think that humans are better than whales, or better than owls or whatever if you don't want to, right? But surely it is not a good idea to think of humans as sort of being scum. You know, that it's OK to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die or whatever. I, I just can't relate to that.

Uhm, Tim...that's kinda, you know, leaning towards nasty I'd say. Might you want to come out against this statement being associated with yours?

More about the movie and its misuse of sources and misrepresentation of the science here.